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he search for inner wealth is much the same as the search for outer wealth. In searching for outer wealth, intelligent people have no problems: They can find it easily. But stu-pid people have lots of difficulties. Look around and you’ll see that poor people are many, while rich people are few. This shows that stupid people are many, while intelligent people are few, which is why there are more poor people than rich people.In the search for inner wealth – virtue and goodness – the same holds true: It depends more on ingenuity than on any other factor. If we’re stupid, then even if we sit right at the hem of the Buddha’s robe or the robe of one of his Noble Disciples, the only result we’ll get will be our own stupidity. To gain ingenuity or virtue from the Buddha or his Noble Disciples is very difficult for a stupid person, because inner wealth depends on ingenuity and intelligence. If we have no ingenuity, we won’t be able to find any inner wealth to provide happiness and ease for the heart.
External wealth is something we’re all familiar with. Money, material goods, living things, and things without life: All of these things are counted as wealth. They are said to belong to who-ever has rights over them. The same holds true with the virtue and goodness we call merit. If unintelligent people search for merit and try to develop virtue and goodness like the people around them, the results will depend on their ingenuity and stu-pidity. If they have little ingenuity, they’ll gain little merit.
As for those of us who have ordained in the Buddha’s reli-gion, our aim is to develop ourselves so as to gain release from
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dukkha, just like a person who aims single-mindedly at being a millionaire.
People in the world have basically three sorts of attitudes. The first sort: Some people are born in the midst of poverty and deprivation because their parents are ignorant, with no wealth at their disposal. They make their living by begging. When they wake up in the morning, they go begging from house to house, street to street, sometimes getting enough to eat, sometimes not.
Their children fall into the same ‘kamma current’. That’s the kind of potential they’ve developed, so they have to be born to im-poverished parents of that sort. They just don’t have it in them to think of being millionaires like those in the world of the wealthy.
The parents to whom they are born act as a mould, so they are lazy and ignorant like their parents. They live in suffering with their parents and go out begging with them, sometimes eating their fill, sometimes not.
But this is still better than other sorts of people. Some par-ents are not only poor, but also earn their living by thievery and robbery. Whatever they get to feed their children, they tell their children what it is and where it came from. The children get this sort of education from their parents and grow up nourished by impure things – things gained through dishonesty, thievery, and robbery – so when they grow up, they don’t have to think of looking for work or for any education at the age when they should be looking for learning, because they’ve already received their education from their parents: Education in stealing, cheat-ing, thievery and robbery, laziness and crookedness. This is because their parents have acted as blackboards covered with writing: Their actions and the manners of their every movement.
Every child born to them receives training in how to act, to speak, and to think. Everything is thus an education from the parents, because the writing and teachings are all there on the blackboard of the parents. Laziness, dishonesty, deceit, thiev-ery: Every branch of evil is there in the writing on the blackboard.
The children learn to read, to draw, to write, all from their par-ents, and fill themselves with the sort of knowledge that has the world up in flames. As they begin to grow up, they take over their parents’ duties by pilfering this and that, until they gradually become hoodlums, creating trouble for society at large. This is one of the major fires burning away at society without stop. The reasons that people can be so destructive on a large scale like this can come either from their parents, from their own innate character, or from associating with evil, dishonest people. This is the sort of attitude found in people of one sort.
The second sort of people have the attitude that even though they won’t be millionaires, they will still have enough to eat and to use like people in general, and that they will be good citizens like the rest of society so that they can maintain a decent repu-tation. People of this sort are relatively hard-working and rarely lazy. They have enough possessions to get by on a level with the general run of good citizens. When they have children, the children take their parents as examples, as writing on the black-board from which they learn their work, their behavior, and all their manners. Once they gain this knowledge from their parents, they put it to use and become good citizens themselves, with enough wealth to get by without hardships, able to keep up with the world so that they don’t lose face or cause their families any shame. They can relate to the rest of society with confidence and without being a disgrace to their relatives or to society in gen-eral. They behave in line with their ideals until they become good citizens with enough wealth to keep themselves out of poverty.
These are the attitudes of the second sort of people.
The third sort of people have attitudes that differ from those of the first two sorts in that they’re determined, no matter what, to possess more wealth than anyone else in the world. They are headed in this direction from the very beginning because they have earned the opportunity to be born in families rich in virtue and material wealth. They learn ingenuity and industriousness
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from their parents, because their parents work hard at commerce and devote themselves fully to all their business activities. What-ever the parents do, the children will have to see. WhatWhat-ever the parents say with regard to their work inside or outside the home, near or far, the children – who are students by nature – will have to listen and take it to heart, because the children are not only students, but also their parents’ closest and most trusted help-ers. The parents can’t overlook them. Eventually they become the supervisors of the parents’ workers inside and outside the home and in all the businesses set up by their parents. In all of the activities for which the parents are responsible, the children will have to be students and workers, at the same time keeping an eye and an ear out to observe and contemplate what is go-ing on around them. All activities, whether in the area of the world, such as commerce, or in the area of the Dhamma – such as maintaining the precepts, chanting, and meditating – are things the children will have to study and pick up from their parents.
Thus parents shouldn’t be complacent in their good and bad activities, acting as they like and thinking that the children won’t be able to pick things up from them. This sort of attitude is not at all fitting, because the way people treat and mistreat the reli-gion and the nation’s institutions comes from what they learn as children. Don’t think that it comes from anywhere else, for no one has ever put old people in school.
We should thus realize that children begin learning the prin-ciples of nature step by step from the day they are born until their parents send them for formal schooling. The principles of na-ture are everywhere, so that anyone who is interested – child or adult – can study them at any time, unlike formal studies and book learning, which come into being at some times and change or disappear at others. For this reason, parents are the most influential mould for their children in the way they look after them, give them love and affection, and provide their education,
both in the principles of nature and in the basic subjects that the children should pick up from them. This is because all children come ready to learn from the adults and the other children around them. Whether they will be good children or bad de-pends on the knowledge they pick up from around them. When this is stored up in their hearts, it will exert pressure on their behavior, making it good or bad, as we see all around us. This comes mainly from what they learn of the principles of nature, which are rarely taught in school, but which people pick up more quickly than anything that school-teachers teach.
Thus parents and teachers should give special attention to every child for whom they are responsible. Even when parents put their children to work, helping with the buying and selling at home, the children are learning the livelihood of buying and selling from their parents – picking up, along the way, their par-ents’ strong and weak points. We can see this from the way children pick up the parents’ religion. However good or bad, right or wrong the religion may be – even if it’s worshipping spirits – the children are bound to pick up their parents’ beliefs and practices. If the parents cherish moral virtue, the children will follow their example, cherishing moral virtue and following the practices of their parents.
This third sort of person is thus very industrious and hard-working, and so reaps better and more outstanding results than the other two sorts.
When we classify people in this way, we can see that people of the first sort are the laziest and most ignorant. At the same time, they make themselves disreputable and objects of the scorn of good people in general. People of the second sort are fairly hard-working and fairly well-off, while those of the third sort are determined to be wealthier than the rest of the world and at the same time are very hard-working because, since they have set their sights high, they can’t just sit around doing nothing. They
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are very persevering and very persistent in their work, going all out to find ways to earn wealth, devoting themselves to their efforts and to being ingenious, circumspect, and uncomplacent in all their activities. People of this sort, even if they don’t be-come millionaires, are important and deserve to be set up as good examples for the people of the nation at large.
We monks fall into the same three sorts. The first sort includes those who are ordained only in name, only as a ceremony, who don’t aim for the Dhamma, for reasonability, or for what’s good or right. They aim simply at living an easy life because they don’t have to work hard like lay people. Once ordained, they become very lazy and very well-known for quarreling with their fellow monks. Instead of gaining merit from being ordained, as most people might think, they end up filling themselves and those around them with suffering and evil.
The second sort of monk aims at what is reasonable. If he can manage to gain release from suffering, that’s what he wants. He believes that there is merit and so he wants it. He believes that there is evil, so he wants really to understand good and evil. He is fairly hard-working and intelligent. He follows the teachings of the Dhamma and vinaya well and so doesn’t offend his fel-low monks. He is interested in studying and diligently practic-ing the threefold trainpractic-ing of virtue, samãdhi, and paññã. He takes instruction easily, has faith in the principles of the Dhamma and vinaya, is intent on his duties, and believes in what is reason-able.
The third sort of monk becomes ordained out of a true sense of faith and conviction. Even if he may not have had much of an education from any teachers in the beginning, once he has become ordained and gains instruction from his teachers or from the texts that give a variety of reasons showing how to act so as to head toward evil and how to strive so as to head toward the good, he immediately takes it as a lesson for training him-self. The more he studies from his teachers, the stronger his faith
and conviction grow, to the point where he develops a firm, sin-gle-minded determination to gain release from dukkha. Whether sitting, standing, walking, or lying down, he doesn’t flag in his determination. He is always firmly intent on gaining release from dukkha. He’s very persistent and hard-working. Whatever he does, he does with his full heart, aiming at reason, aiming at the Dhamma.
This third sort of monk is the uncomplacent sort. He observes the precepts for the sake of real purity and observes them with great care. He is uncomplacent both in training his mind in sa-mãdhi and in giving rise to paññã. He is intent on training the basic sati-paññã he already has as an ordinary run-of-the-mill person, so that they become more and more capable, step by step, making them the sort of sati-paññã that can keep abreast of his every action until they become sati and supreme-paññã, capable of shedding all kilesas and ãsava from the heart.
He thus becomes one of the amazing people of the religion, earning the homage and respect of people at large.
In the area of the world there are three sorts of people, and in the area of the Dhamma there are three sorts of monks. Which of the three are we going to choose to be? When we come right down to it, each of these three types refers to each of us, be-cause we can make ourselves into any of them, making them appear within us – because these three types are simply for the purpose of comparison. When we refer them to ourselves, we can be any of the three. We can be the type who makes himself vile and lazy, with no interest in the practice of the Dhamma, with no value at all; or we can make ourselves into the second or third sort. It all depends on how our likes and desires will affect our attitudes in our thoughts, words, and deeds. Which-ever type we want to be, we should adapt our thoughts, words, and deeds to fit the type. The affairs of that sort of person will then become our own affairs, because none of these sorts lies beyond us. We can change our behavior to fit in with any of the
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three. If we are going to be the third sort of person, then no matter what, we are sure to release ourselves from dukkha some-day in the future or in this very lifetime.
So be uncomplacent in all your activities, mindful of your efforts and actions, and discerning with regard to your affairs at all times. Don’t let the activities of your thoughts, words, and deeds go straying down the wrong path. Try to train your sati-paññã to stay involved with your activities at all times. To safe-guard these sorts of things isn’t as difficult as safesafe-guarding external wealth, because inner wealth stays with us, which makes it possible to safeguard it.
As a monk, you have only one duty. When sitting, be aware that you’re sitting. Whatever issue you think about, know that you’re thinking. Don’t assume that any issue comes from any-where other than from a lapse of mindfulness in your own heart, which makes wrong issues – from minor ones to major ones – start spreading to your own detriment. All of this comes from your own lack of watchfulness and restraint. It doesn’t come from anything else. If you want to gain release from dukkha in this lifetime, then see the dangers of your own errors, your com-placency, and your lack of mindfulness. See them as your en-emies. If, in your eyes, the currents of the mind that spin to give rise to the cravings and ãsava termed the origin of dukkha are something good, then you’re sure to go under. Be quick to shed these things immediately. Don’t let them lie fermenting in your heart.
Those who see danger in the round of rebirth must see the danger as lying in the accumulation of kilesa. Your duties in the practice are like the fence and walls of a house that protect you stage by stage from danger. In performing your duties that con-stitute the effort of the practice, you have to keep your mind-fulness with those duties and not let it lapse. Nourish your sati-paññã so that they are always circumspect in all your affairs.
Don’t let them flow away on the habitual urges of the heart. You can then be sure that the affairs of the citta will not in any way lie beyond the power of your effort and control.
So I ask that each of you be mindful – and don’t let your mindfulness conjecture ahead or behind with thoughts of the past or future. Always keep it aware of your activities, and you will be able to go beyond this mass of dukkha. Even if your citta hasn’t yet attained stillness, it will begin to be still through the power of mindfulness. There is no need to doubt this, for the citta
So I ask that each of you be mindful – and don’t let your mindfulness conjecture ahead or behind with thoughts of the past or future. Always keep it aware of your activities, and you will be able to go beyond this mass of dukkha. Even if your citta hasn’t yet attained stillness, it will begin to be still through the power of mindfulness. There is no need to doubt this, for the citta